


a rose decays

by oh-boleyn (scrxamitout)



Category: Six - Marlow/Moss
Genre: (c) patdfobmcr-yt tumblr, Angst, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Past Abuse, Past Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:55:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27611018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scrxamitout/pseuds/oh-boleyn
Summary: A tragedy, a broken heart. It made her story feel believable, it was something out of her control, something in the force of nature and not in her hands.Something inevitable.Except maybe it was.orJane killed herself in history.
Comments: 15
Kudos: 39





	1. you had your roses

**Author's Note:**

> Credits for this idea go to patdfobmcr-yt on Tumblr!   
> It's beta'ed by Lexi who is really helping me with a lot of stuff right now so I'm really glad she's also helping me with this.

There was nothing Jane Seymour could do to change her past, that much was true.

Once upon a time, before the kings fell, when the tales of demons and angels were still revolving around her, she might have had a chance. Just after fetching for Joan she might have had a chance. As the sweet poison slowly filled her mouth, just as she said her goodbyes to her sweet boy and prayed to God to take her soul into His realm, she might have had the smaller chance to purge, to let herself free of the curse she had just tied to herself. To change her future.

But no, she could never change her past.

Jane didn’t regret it immediately when she resurrected, but once she saw the three wives that came after, something inside told her a secret must be kept a secret. She did, she carefully maintained the lie, working the engines behind scenes to declare that it was never her wish, that she never wanted it to happen, that it was a tragedy.

A tragedy, a broken heart. It made her story feel believable, it was something out of her control, something in the force of nature and not in her hands. Something inevitable. Just as the fates of the other women who reincarnated with her. And it was easy to believe for the rest of them, because sweet,  _ plain _ Jane would rarely take such a rash and wild decision.

She wouldn’t leave her baby, her redeemer, behind.

Nonetheless she had seen Catherine of Aragon, the first queen. She has heard about the young prince who took his last breath without seeing his first birthday. About the bastard duke who didn’t survive to turn eighteen summers of age. About Anne Boleyn losing her saviour. There was no guarantee.

The birth of a baby boy was no guarantee of the birth of a king, nor the chance that another one will follow him.

Her position of queen was not secure, not with Henry around. It was her or him, and plotting against the king could easily go wrong. It was safer to plot against herself. To try to pick a poison that would make her death as painless as possible, even if she would have to agonize for days so the king won’t suspect a murder.

She made sure that her sweet child would be secured with a christening, and live enough days to feel joy one last time, to try and remember the taste of life. And when the time came, she lied in bed, strategically, praying that hell wouldn’t burn as much as it was supposed to.

But then she woke up, and for a moment she thought all tactics in the world were not going to work. She could sense Henry’s hands, sense his presence in the room, hear his voice echoing and the pain distant. Except it was just a phantom of something that once was a woman's worst nightmare.

Jane Seymour woke up almost five hundred years later, lying in the cold ground, as faces of ghosts stared at her.

No one looked the same, instead it was replaced with a familiar echo of people who should be long dead. People who did not fit in the modern world, and for a moment, none of them were willing to do so. And then their ladies came into the room, bearing the news of some strange force that had brought them back.

But it was years ago now, and they had settled in a perfect kind of life, a life where everyone belonged. When the fear was left behind, and the truth has been told by themselves and not anyone else. Nevertheless, Jane kept her secret, in the shadows of her own —and her lady’s— mind.

How could she ever explain that the milk in her tea tasted as sweet as the poison? With a slight taste of almonds, and the burning feeling in her throat?

She tries to stop the train of thought, already noticing that the rest of the queens see how uninterested she looks about the conversation they were having before. Instead, she’s lost in her thoughts, lost in what she once knew. Lost in a secret that was too big to handle, even in simpler times like drinking tea with her fellow queens.

Jane holds the cup firmer in her hand, as her moonlit eyes stare at Katherine, and then at Anna, to finally land on Parr. How could she ever explain that what followed was her fault? That she was supposed to live but she took the other way out?

It came suddenly, how she had poisoned history when poisoned herself. She had allowed her brothers’ wrath to eat and devour everything with their power, to break the family that they once were and became, to just leave ashes behind. The third queen had provoked Anna’s departure from her family to an unhappy marriage that did not last, which chained to the events that got Katherine beheaded, and Catherine almost following the same path.

She can’t take her eyes out of Katherine, sweet, almost childish, who tried to grow so fast and live as much as she could for all she didn’t enjoy before. Katherine, who was no more than a teenager, barely more than a child. Katherine, who trusted her so much. Katherine, who would sit with her. Katherine, who would try to cheer her up telling stories about Edward.

Katherine, who did not deserve her destiny.

The teacup is broken in a million pieces before Jane could react.

It felt like drowning in her own lies, like succumbing to poison once again.

The feeling grew, through her chest, slowly taking everything with it. It was overwhelming, it was invasive, it was unwanted. But it was still there, making itself clear, slowly taking the air out of her lungs. It was agonizing, nevertheless she was not dying this time.

How could she so peacefully think about it, not regretting her decision, just to then be losing her mind when she saw the consequences?

It was a lie, like ivy, twisting around herself. Choking with her own actions and words, in a way that she could never explain to anyone else. The ignorance of the rest of the queens, of the rest of the ladies, and the pitied looks Joan sometimes gave to her.

All was crumbling back without her being able to do anything. It was a weight so heavy, a force so strong, that she had no way to break from it, no way to escape again as she did in the past. It was hurting her from inside, making her sicker each day. It was hard to move, hard to eat and talk.

It was just so hard to be alive when she wasn’t supposed to.

“Jane, can you hear me?” Katherine asked, worried.

“I’m sorry.” She muttered, words slowly falling from her lips as she closed her eyes shut.

“Hey, it’s okay, it’s just a mug,” Boleyn replied, sweeter than she has ever talked to Jane, “we have a lot of them after all.”

The broken pieces of ceramic shine in contrast with the light, forming little sparkling particles around her. It all feels so broken, in a way that there’s no going back. There’s no way to collect each small piece of the mug and form it together again, as much as she would love to there’s nothing left to do now.

When a rose decays you can’t bring it back to life.

And yet it circles back to the fact that she’ll always stay. The atrocious feeling that as much as she tried, she was still back. Her connection with Henry, with the other queens, was so strong to make that impossible. Because she was back, hundreds of years after the poison.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Jane,” Parr pronounces her name carefully, “what’s going on? Are you alright?”


	2. but nothing, nothing lasts forever

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm scared that if I don't post my internet will just die (I'm on a vacation so I'm doing my best), anyway, a big thank you to Lexi because without her I could've never do this and she really helps me through everything and she obviously beta'ed this and was super patient with me.

During the show it was hard to explain how small her words felt. She hadn’t let Henry choose her path, and instead had taken the matter in her own hands. For how horrible and jagged her death was, she was the one to dictate and execute the penalty.

Jane had decided to leave behind all she once knew, even when the idea of being back five hundred years later didn’t cross her mind.

Because what was life when one was not free. Why would she have stayed in pain and silence? Why would she have stayed by his side? Why would one want to live a life full of pain, when there’s another way out? Why can’t she just own it, just admit of what she had done in a previous life?

Joan shoots her a glance from the other side of the stage, knowing that the third queen has been struggling for days.

They never talked about what happened, a mutual agreement that there are things that can’t be discussed. Different times, different people to the ones they had become. There’s also fear, fear of rejection, of what others might say, of knowing the pain that Jane lived to have made the lady in waiting an accessory of her own demise.

Joan knew it all too well, she knew the wife before, she knew the end. And when there’s no way to change it, the honourable way sometimes is making it painless. On their own terms. To be able to say one last goodbye. The lack of choices about her own life and body was asphyxiating her, having to choose when she didn’t have any options. To be between the wall and the sword and decide.

Decide.

To make a final choice. Final, but what is final when you later reincarnate?

Is it a sort of sentence you finish in order to start a new, fresh one, or is it just the forged, illegitimate idea of a never-ending story? It was time and time again, making a choice and being robbed, stripped of it. Because Jane had forged her path, but a strange force still didn’t allow her to rest in peace as she asked and hoped to.

Years lost in the shadows of death, that felt so natural, so peaceful and welcoming. It was their time, until it wasn’t; and it was never talked, until they did. But it was never true from her side, never real, never what had actually happened.

How could she explain how torn between two opposite feelings she was?

She was so glad and relieved about escaping Hell, about escaping him. She was pleased with the idea that his hands were five hundred years in the past, that his greed had died so long ago. She was ultimately free, and not in the world she knew, but rather in something so new. So modern. So different. She had a freedom she could’ve never imagined. An access to education and information so vast that she could finally raise her voice. Knowledge as a way of autonomy. Something so precious, something she never dared to dream about before.

But when she thought about it, when she thought about the baby she barely held. About the teenager she could’ve saved. About everyone who died because of her. How she couldn’t stop any of the wicked attempts of her family to get more power. How, in some way, she had laid a hand in the remaining three queens being forced to suffer fates worse than her own.

She could feel panic, sadness. So many lives lost, wasted because of her choices. Poisoned, broken. Lives that should’ve been better, happier. That should have just happened, not died because of her own voracity and egocentrism. She could almost feel regret.

But ultimately she couldn’t.

Could she seek forgiveness for something for which she didn’t feel regret?

The lights finally go off, and she’s the last one to leave the stage. Jane walks down the stairs carefully, trying to be present in the moment, to not miss a step. The lights are so bright, electrical, and the walls are painted in a yellowish beige colour. She has photos on her mirror, and her phone is on the table. Everything is in there, every piece of the modern world.

But it feels wrong, and if she just takes the second to blink, she can feel herself at court. Back to darkness. Back to threats, to the ghost of people who she can now see smiling. She can feel the fatal liquid and the second of doubt she had. The great nothing and the moment she feared, dreaded, but dreamed and longed for. The remembrance of him.

“Jane, are you alright?” Aragon asks.

She tries to reply, but her mind is lost in the palace, lost in the past.

In death.

Her death.

“Jane?” Aragon tries again.

“I’m sorry,” Her voice sounds small, smaller than ever before, “or I’m not. It’s just so…”

“What happened?”

Brown eyes with a flicker of gold are staring at her intensely, and a warmness goes through her body. She takes one of her hands, and it would be so easy to come clean, to just explain it, to seek forgiveness. But would she ever get it? Would she ever deserve for anyone to know? Will they understand?

After how they didn’t want to die, how much they fought and tried to stay alive against everything, could they understand how she didn’t even try? How she didn’t value the opportunity to stay in the realm of the living?

“I killed myself.”

And it comes to life that, three simple words, said in the most concise way possible, with a sadness still present, with the instant wish those words were never said. It comes as something so easy, but then why are those words asphyxiating her so slowly?

“What?” Aragon wonders, a hint of confusion in her voice.

“When Edward… After Edward was born, I fetched for Joan, I asked her to bring me poison.” She confesses, wiping off a tear that she hadn’t felt coming. “I drank it. It made me feverish, delirious for a couple of days until it made its effect. I killed myself because I was so tired of  _ him.  _ So tired of being scared. I’m so sorry.”

The last words come barely above a whisper, and she tries to focus her eyes back at the first queen. She remains the same, expecting, with warm eyes and soft skin. She remains calm, remains herself. And for a second Jane is sure Aragon is even smiling lightly.

“You’ve kept this secret for yourself all this time?” Jane nods. “It must have been so hard,  _ amor _ .”

The third queen is quickly embraced in a hug, the costumes making it just the sightliest bit uncomfortable. And she feels so relieved, she feels at peace about how nothing changed. About how she can still feel the appreciation from her friend in the same way as before.

“I can’t tell Katherine.” She suddenly says.

“Why?” Aragon wonders.

“I don’t want her to know about my cowardice, about how I didn’t even fight.”

“But it wasn’t an easy choice,” The Spanish woman insists, “and it isn’t like fighting was going to get you anywhere far. But I understand.”

“Thank you.” Jane mutters.

“Just promise me that you’ll stay safe. With us. And you can talk to me if you need to talk about this, I won’t push, I won’t ask for more. I just want you to be you, to be happy.”

Jane nods one more time, holding on tight to her friend.

For how wicked she felt, there was also a washed feeling of calm, of finally being able to breathe just a little easier.

She’ll take the victory for now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as always, comments and kudos are super nice and makes me really happy! also come to say hi to my tumblr (oh-boleyn)!

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are more than just appreciated and obviously kudos too!  
> Also come and say hi on my tumblr oh-boleyn!


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